In England Now
Ecclesiology –The Science of the Church
The word Ecclesiology has three quite different meanings:
To an older generation it usually meant "the study of church buildings and their furnishings" – altars, rood-screens, pews, chalices, stained-glass and suchlike. With this meaning we are not concerned here.
To the average Englishman today the word Ecclesiology – if it means anything at all – refers to the business of the Church on earth. It’s about Bishops, Dioceses and their Boards-of-This-and-That; it’s about Parishes and Appointments and Evangelical and Catholic groups within the church; it’s about High Churches and Low Churches and who owns which bit of property; it’s about how many seats were won by which Group in the last elections to General Synod. Ecclesiology is "Church Politics" writ large.
To the well-educated Christian, however, Ecclesiology means the essential and eternal truths, revealed to us by God through Jesus Christ, about the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" which he created and ordained, which Christians profess to believe in every time they say the Creed. Ecclesiology is concerned with the objective truth about that Church, not the subjective feelings about it which we experience locally at any particular moment.
It’s with those who fall into Category Two and Three, and their differing attitudes to Ecclesiology that we shall be concerned from now onwards.
The difference between their respective understanding about Ecclesiology is well illustrated in No. 2 of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Screwtape, a Senior Tempter, is writing to his young nephew, Wormwood – a mere junior devil – about the fact that the latter’s "patient", a young man in his early twenties, has become a Christian.
After reprimanding Wormwood severely for his carelessness in allowing this to happen in the first place, Screwtape goes on to give him some sound advice from his own experience of how to win back into the Way of Darkness those who have turned to Christ. He says:
"There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.
"One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate… When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided... All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question `If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?"
To equate the word "church" with any local and visible manifestation of it on earth ("our local church") is a serious misunderstanding, as Screwtape indicates in his letter. The Church of God is the Body of Christ (see e.g. Ephesians 1:22–23; Colossians 1:18,24 and many other places). This comprises not just the "whole state of Christ’s Church Militant here on earth" but the Church Expectant and the Church Triumphant in Heaven as well. "That", as Screwtape wryly says, "is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy".
People in Category Two are often heard to say "But I’m not interested in Ecclesiology". Who can blame them? Politics, and Church Politics in particular, appeals primarily to those with a taste for controversy and confrontation – things which the average churchgoer does not relish!.
But when supposedly well-educated Christians – people like us who fall into Category Three – say we’re not interested in Ecclesiology, we are making a serious mistake. It would be as foolish as saying that we’re not interested in Christology (that is to say, our understanding of the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ). You and I can no more afford to be uninterested in Ecclesiology – in that third and most important sense – than we can about Christology, because the two are inseparable.
The very survival of the Church in early times depended upon people getting both their Christology and their Ecclesiology right, in the face of the many erroneous ideas which were (and still are today) doing the rounds amongst those "who profess to call themselves Christians". We can no more afford be wrong in our understanding of the Church, than we can afford to be wrong about whether Jesus is really God, whether he had a real human body, whether he died on the cross on Good Friday, or rose from the dead at Easter.
It’s quite easy to understand why people fight shy of thinking about the Church and prefer to apply their minds to other more congenial aspects of theology. It’s because the contrast between our first-hand, "Ground Zero", experience of the local Church on a Sunday and everything we’ve been taught to believe about the Church as the Body of Christ is such a stark and uncomfortable one, as Screwtape pointed out in his letter. It’s not surprising that ordinary people just "don’t want to know" when they discover for the first time how great that contrast is.
That painful discovery is worth comparing with something every nurse or doctor encounters when they start their training. They enjoy the sense that they are entering an ancient and honourable profession. They are fascinated to learn about the human body in the classroom lectures. But when first confronted with the realities of everyday nursing on the ward – emptying bedpans, and dealing with ungracious and ungrateful patients and their relatives – they find out that actually "being" a doctor or a nurse is a very different story!
Well, the Church-on-earth, the hands-on bit which you and I have to deal with, is more like a hospital ward than most people care to suppose. For the Church-on-earth is entirely made up of patients who are suffering from the same lethal spiritual epidemic (otherwise called "sin"). We’ve all succumbed to it.. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God", said St Paul (Romans 3:23) – our Church’s "doctors and nurses" are suffering from it just like everyone else and, like a hospital ward, there are plenty of people around with short-fuses, especially if they’re feeling sick and unhappy!
The first Christians had no illusions about the importance of the Church. "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus est – without the Church there is no salvation". They may have disagreed, as Christians today still do, about where the boundaries of the Church should be drawn; but they had no doubt at all that Christ’s Church of which they were members, or limbs, was (and is!) "his new creation by water and the Word".
This confusion between the Church of God and its local manifestations on earth has been around the Anglican Communion for a long time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, there were those who people called themselves Anglicans who regarded their religion as a sort of optional bolt-on accessory to the British Empire, something which Englishmen would do well to export to the benighted heathen (which included, of course, Roman Catholics and Orthodox). The Church (of England, naturally!) was like their (British, of course!) Empire, on which the sun would never set..
This view, though widely held, was never, even at the Empire’s height, officially held by the Church of England. The Anglican Church had no distinctive doctrines of its own but professed the historic Creeds and formularies and was a legitimate part of the "good estate of the Catholic church" for which its members were bidden to pray in the Prayer for the Church Militant here on Earth in the Book of Common Prayer
After World Wars I and II however, Anglican leaders had to come to terms with the fact that the British Empire and Anglicanism were unlikely to conquer the world, as once was thought inevitable. From the 1960s onwards a new tune began to be heard. Instead of believing that "everyone should be like the Church of England" they were attracted to the idea that the way in which Anglicans in one part of the world decided to run "their" church need bear very little relation to what their counterparts did in another part.
So from the ’60s onwards, at an ever-increasing rate, the Anglican Communion turned itself into an amalgam of loosely associated Provinces and Dioceses whose sole unifying feature was that they were all "in communion" with the Archbishop of Canterbury. His rôle was to be the "first among equals" in what was in effect a man-made association of more-or-less like-minded churchpeople. In matters of doctrine, morals, and order they could be autonomous.
This idea fits in well with the fashionable secular belief that "all truth is relative" – the view that what is true at one time or in one place or for one person, need not be true at other times or for other people. According to this view, the way Provinces and Dioceses of the Anglican Communion organise their ministry, what they teach about faith and morals, and how they exercise discipline is something better left to the local culture and tradition to decide and determine. So a Province A where there is a strong feminist culture in society will decide to ordain women as priests and bishops; whilst nearby Province B will refrain from doing so – though, according to the Province A mindset, "in time of course they’ll learn to accept and even welcome them like any normal people would". On the same principle Province C will ordain non-celibate homosexuals whilst Province D will not. Diocese E will opt for an "enlightened" view of abortion as an expression of "every woman’s right to choose" whereas Diocese F, for the time being anyway, will refuse to do so – until, of course, they too "see the light" which (according to this way of reasoning) they inevitably will do sooner or later.
All very confusing, no doubt, to the simple minded layman who finds that one diocese commending what its neighbour condemns. But why worry? "Anglicanism’s about mutual tolerance, isn’t it? – and that’s all we’re asking for"
We could go on for ever cataloguing the practices and beliefs to which the New Ecclesiology, as one might call it, has spawned. It’s reminds one of the New Morality which grew up alongside it in the ’60s. To find out more, just read up about the history of the Anglican Communion during the past fifty years, and then look at what’s on the future agenda of some of our more "advanced and enlightened" Provinces today. It all has a suspiciously familiar ring to it.
We who belong to Category Three must try to grasp the fact that once the Church loses interest in Ecclesiology, and ignores the Catholic (i.e. "Universal") nature of Christ’s Church, they will inevitably feel justified in their own sight in doing anything and everything that pleases, appeals or feels right to them.
Between those who see the Church as an organism – in fact the Body of Christ, despite all its earthly shortcomings and limitations – and those who see it as a human-directed voluntary organisation of likeminded people – the Anglican equivalent of the United Nations – there will inevitably be a great gulf fixed: permanent, non-negotiable and ever-growing..
The UNO-Church, as it might be called, will see no very good reason why everything and anything in faith or morals shouldn’t be "up for grabs" (as Bishop Spong so graphically put it); the Catholic Church, because it is the Body of Christ, knows that it just doesn’t have the authority to change its beliefs, its orders or its morals which have been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, through Scripture by the operation of the Holy Spirit.
So I’m afraid it’s just too bad if the world doesn’t like or embrace the morals, orders or beliefs of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In this matter, as in many others, the world has got it wrong. It’s a terminally sick world, and unless and until it’s prepared to take the Three Steps To Getting Healed, terminally sick it will remain.
The Three Steps.
If we want to be healed of our sickness then it’s necessary to do the following:
acknowledge the need for God’s forgiveness and grace through Jesus Christ;
enter Christ’s Hospital, the Church, through its ever-open door despite its many earthly shortcomings; and
submit ourselves to whatever treatment God deems to be necessary.
"There is no healing to be found outside the Church" is an equally accurate translation of "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus est!"